Codespell, page 27
part #3 of Ravirn Series
Melchior’s eyes popped in his screen image. “I can’t get my head around the quantum stuff—it’s too alien to the way I think—but did you just figure out a way to bleed all the heat out of the system and directly into the Primal Chaos?”
“Uh-huh. I think I did.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That pretty much sums it up.”
“Sums up what?” asked Tisiphone’s voice from behind me.
Even though I’d grown used to her silent comings and goings and not only familiar with, but deeply fond of, her voice, I still just about jumped out of my skin.
She laughed and wrapped her arms around me from behind. “I love it when you do that.”
“I don’t,” I grumped, but then she started nibbling on my ear. “OK, so it’s got its rewards. What did you find out?”
Tisiphone stiffened. “Nothing.”
“Really?” I turned in her arms and looked into her eyes.
She closed them wearily and leaned her forehead against mine. “Really.”
“Tell me about it.” If someone else had joined the very small club of Fury escapees, that was big news. “What happened? ”
Tisiphone let go of me and started to pace. “It’s hard to explain really. It went where I couldn’t follow.”
“How is that possible?” I asked. “The only place that I know of that you can’t get to at the moment is wherever Necessity is. Surely you’re not suggesting . . .”
“No, of course not. There are all sorts of places the Furies can’t go, or at least we can’t go uninvited or unsent. Hades is a good example. That’s why we didn’t just follow you through the gates when you went there the second time. Well, that and a bit of complicity on my part and that of your doggy friend. Megaera argued for hot-pursuit rules, but I insisted otherwise, and Cerberus refused to acknowledge a warrant issued by Fate instead of Necessity. Alecto agreed with me and Cerberus for reasons of her own.”
I felt something like an icy hand touch the back of my neck. That possibility had never even crossed my mind at the time.
“So, where did the spinnerette go?” I asked. While I might never want to return to Hades, my experiences over the last couple of years suggested that knowing someplace the Furies couldn’t follow might come in handy.
“I’d rather not say.”
I don’t know if my face gave me away or what, but Tisiphone laughed then and bent to kiss my cheek.
“You’re too transparent, my dear. We shall never again come after you without orders from Necessity herself.” She looked very sad for a moment. “Were it her hand that had signed your death decree, no power of the heavens or Earth could stop us.”
I decided that I didn’t like the way the conversation was turning and aimed it back at the spinnerette, “So, it got away?”
“For now,” growled Tisiphone, “only for now. When we have Necessity restored, things will change. In the meantime, I’ve been too long away and too long without satisfaction.”
She scooped me into her arms as easily as I might pick up a cat and started toward the stairs. As we entered the bedroom, the cynical side of my brain wondered if she had wanted to change the subject as badly as I had or if maybe this was just her way of sublimating for a failed hunt. Then I was too busy to wonder anything at all.
Tisiphone sat on a stool in the corner of the clean room while Melchior and I put the finishing touches on his shiny new home. Once we had all the parts, most of the construction was utter simplicity. Even working out the spellcode for customizing the case and motherboard hadn’t involved anything all that difficult.
The one really tricky bit of coding had been modifying the assembly spell that had come with the schematics for the quantum-processor chip so as to accommodate my new cooling scheme. But I felt pretty confident of the result. It was, after all, a hack job rather than a ground-up design task and, therefore, right up my alley.
“What do you think?” I asked Melchior after I put the last screw in place and covered it over with a rubber foot.
“Pretty spiffy,” he replied, though the slight shake in his voice belied his grin.
I couldn’t blame him on that front, although it really was a spiffy job. We’d ditched the rounded clamshell shape for a slightly more conventional but significantly smaller rectangle, making him more of a subnotebook than a true laptop. Made of Kevlar and carbon fiber, his computer form would weigh in at just under a pound and measure less than a half inch thick.
To make up for the lack of style in shape, we’d modded the hell out of his color scheme and added a bunch of LED telltales and translucence effect. His top surface was a very pale blue with the outline of his face etched into it. That made the area within the etching just enough thinner that the screen brightness could be stepped up to show through. For privacy reasons it wasn’t on all the time, but if Mel wanted to, he could put up text you could read without actually opening the case.
Underneath, we’d gone for a much deeper blue, with loops of superbright LEDs embedded in the surface. When he activated them, they looked vaguely like glowing scales edged in whatever color struck his fancy. The extrathick rubber feet we’d put on raised him just enough so that in a dark room, an eerie glow would show from underneath.
The new case was banded in hardened anodized aluminum. Edge on, you saw two mirror-bright strips of cobalt blue metal. Likewise, his screen was surrounded with a border of brightly finished aluminum, natural silver this time except for the goblin-head logo below the screen, which matched the cobalt of his outer rim.
His keyboard was a block of white surrounded by blue, with keys that lit up from underneath and a goblin-head trackpad. The ears provided left and right mouse buttons. With the assembly finished, all that was left to do was a full test run and the transfer itself. For the former, we hooked the laptop up to a bank of Ahllan’s diagnostics and controllers and set it to running. Over the next hour, it cycled all sorts of spellcode through the processor and drives and shifted the box back and forth into goblin shape a half dozen times.
That was downright creepy. Since we’d left Mel’s goblin shape essentially untouched, I kept getting moments of what felt like double vision as a comatose Mel would appear on the table beside the original, upright, version.
“Oh my,” said Haemun, who’d just brought a tray bearing a pitcher of lemonade and glasses for all as the next round of shape-shifting hit.
I took my glass with a stifled sigh. I just didn’t have the heart to tell him he shouldn’t be bringing them into the clean room.
The worst though was when the test bank ran short phrases of spoken text through the goblin form. Watching the blank-faced webgoblin’s lips move seemingly without any animating will evoked a talking corpse. Finally, the bank whistled a snippet of test spell, and we all startled.
“Really,” gasped Mel. “That’s so cool!” The new Mel self-harmonized. Or at least, the test run did.
“Makes sense,” I said, “since the processor’s a webtroll model.”
A moment later, the test bank beeped itself into silence, and the diagnostics screen started scrolling information. There was a lot there, and we read it all, but the key phrase came at the very end. “Unit is fully functional and ready for transfer.”
I turned to Melchior. “Are you ready?”
“As I ever will be,” he whispered.
"You don’t have to do this,” I said. “You know that, right?”
“I’m scared,” he replied. “But I want to do it. Hook me up.”
He climbed onto the table and shifted into laptop form, opening his external drive bay. I took one last look at the memory crystal we’d selected and placed it in the bay. A bright rich blue, it was the cleanest and clearest of all the crystals in Ahllan’s stores, never before used and still in the original packaging until we’d plugged it in for a function check. It wasn’t the biggest unit she’d had, though it was huge—about six terabytes capacity—because what was important was the least possible corruption and cross contamination.
The drive closed and I plugged Melchior into the controller bank, then did one last check on the transfer program. Everything looked good.
“Take care, my friend.”
I hit the button that would copy Melchior into the crystal, erasing each individual bit of information from his online memory as soon as it had verified the write function in the crystal. A cumbersome and dangerous process—any information that miscopied would be lost forever—but a necessary one.
For many years, the Fates had copied files across to a new troll each time they upgraded, discarding the old hardware and personality rather than performing this sort of transfer. That hadn’t always been the case, or so I’d learned from Ahllan. In the beginning, there’d been multiple attempts to copy the contents of the old drive over the new one via a networking cable. They had always failed, with resultant massive data loss in both computers. Restoring from backups could usually reproduce all the files, but it always left both systems as plain old computers rather than AIs.
The reason for that—unknown at the time—was the soulware, the actual extraphysical entity of the original AI. It couldn’t exist in two places simultaneously, and when it was forced to try, the soul died. The only exception to that rule in the history of the multiverse to date was Shara, when she split herself because of the Persephone virus, and we still didn’t fully understand what had happened there. Only by completely transferring the soul to an internal vessel—the memory crystal—and then moving that across to the new body could the transfer be effected safely.
The Fates had discovered the process through trial and error—though they still hadn’t known about the souls—but decided it risked too much data loss and opted for the more wasteful but reliable cycle of junking the old trolls, personality and all.
“How long will it take?” Haemun asked after a while.
“About twenty minutes of write time, thirty seconds to move the crystal, another twenty minutes of read time, and at least an hour for system initialization on the new body.”
“When will we know if it worked?” Haemun’s voice sounded very small and worried, and I was forcefully reminded that his own personal magic gave him special insight into my emotional states and needs.
“Not until the very end,” I replied. “Not until he—”
I was interrupted by a crash as Haemun dropped the drinks tray he still carried. The heavy earthenware pitcher burst apart, spraying lemonade everywhere. I had just an instant to regret not telling him to wait outside the clean room before he fell to the floor, curling into a ball in the mess and slipping quickly into unconsciousness.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, kneeling and putting a hand on his shoulder.
It was Tisiphone who answered after sniffing the air for a moment. “Nemesis is here.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I glanced from Haemun’s crumpled form to the table that held Melchior’s body in mid-soul transfer. Nemesis would be knocking on the door any second, and in my whole life I’d rarely felt more helpless.
“How much longer?” Tisiphone jerked her chin at Melchior.
“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “Ten minutes? Maybe a bit more. It’s hard to say. But that’s just the write function— you heard what I told Haemun.”
“Once he’s written into the crystal, will he be stable?” she asked.
A boom sounded from upstairs—the front door shattering.
“For a while at least, but I don’t know how long. No one’s ever tested what happens if you delay the transfer. I’d rather not be the first.”
Tisiphone shrugged, her face grim. “I can buy you ten minutes; that I swear. I don’t know if I can do more, but I’ll try. You’d better get some sort of exit strategy going in the meantime.” She turned toward the door. “Good-bye.”
I leaped up and caught her arm, and she let me spin her back to face me.
“Good luck,” I said, and kissed her.
She leaned into the kiss for just a second, then pulled away. “Thanks, but don’t worry so much. This will be the most fun I’ve had in years.” She winked. “Present company excepted, of course. Bar the door.” Then she was gone, moving with that insane speed that dazzled the eye.
I locked both the wardroom and clean-room doors, then set about crafting a faerie ring. As I worked, the sounds of violent destruction filtered down from above, along with the occasional puff of dust from the ceiling after a particularly loud and destructive impact. The horrible screams and howls sounded worse yet, something like a Hollywood director’s fantasy of fifty giant alien cat creatures in the midst of a drug-fueled interstellar gang war.
Then the ring was finished, manifesting as a perfect circle of circuit-patterned mushrooms. I’d performed the task often enough now that I managed not to scorch the ceiling or knock myself over. Next, I checked the telltales on the controller to see where Melchior was in the process—perhaps three-quarters done.
I hate waiting. My eyes fell on Haemun, and I had an idea for reducing the total number of hostages. Half-lifting the satyr, I very gently slid him over the edge of the faerie ring. I could feel the magic tugging at him, ready to tumble him randomly through the infinity of the multiverse, but I didn’t let him go. That would have been almost as bad as anything Nemesis could do. Instead, I sent my awareness into the network, creating a set of conditions rather than searching for a specific ring. When I thought I’d achieved them, I gave him a gentle nudge, and he was gone.
If things worked as I intended, he would in the very same instant have appeared in a temporary ring on Olympus, one tilted steeply enough to tumble him out of the ring and into the grasses beyond. It was the best I could do at the moment and a whole lot better than what he might have had to face if he stayed with us.
After that there was nothing left to do but wait. I put my body between Melchior and the clean-room door and kept one eye on the monitor as the seconds ticked away. The transfer was almost complete when the first impact struck the door of the wardroom beyond.
“Come on, little buddy,” I whispered. “Hurry.” Then I drew my sword and my pistol, the latter left-handed.
I wouldn’t have much time. As the door cracked under a second blow, I whistled a spell significantly shorter than its name: “Safeties? We don’t need no stinking safeties.”
A moment later I heard the outer door shatter. Only one thin panel now stood between me and my Nemesis. I took a firm stance and pointed my pistol at the door even as it bowed inward with Nemesis’s first strike. Three more blows broke the door in two, sending the upper half tumbling into the clean room. For a second Nemesis’s torso was silhouetted in the opening. I centered my sights on her chest and pulled the trigger, emptying my .45’s clip at a magically enhanced full auto.
A human wouldn’t have been able to hold the pistol on target. Even my wrist ached at the recoil, but it only lasted for an instant. Without waiting to see what damage I might have done, I threw the gun at her face and went for my dagger.
She caught it out of the air and snapped it back at me—so much for any hopes that the bullets would accomplish what Tisiphone had not. Reflexively, I dodged aside, then winced as I heard the pistol hit the equipment behind me. Breathing a little prayer to the goddess of fortune that it hadn’t destroyed anything involved in Melchior’s transfer, I took a long, lunging step forward, trying to skewer Nemesis with my rapier as she burst through what was left of the door.
There was a snap and a flash of numbing pain in my cheek as the world tumbled around me. Somewhere in there I lost my grip on my sword’s hilt. It was only as I hit and shattered the legs of the table where Melchior’s new body rested that I realized I was flying through the air. With a convulsive effort, I caught the falling subnotebook before it could hit the floor. Together, we slid into the corner. I ended up flat on my back, with my legs pressed against the wall amidst the wreckage of the table.
